1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical support system which centrally manages medical information such as medical charts and medical images such as X-ray images created by more than one hospital.
2. Description of the Related Art
A hospital has a wide variety of jobs such as dealing with arriving people, examining patients, hospitalizing patients, producing X-ray photographs of patients and so on. Thus, various pieces of information, such as medical charts, X-ray photographs, etc., (hereinafter referred to as medical information) are produced. Considerable labor is required to manage such medical information.
In order to meet the problem, a medical information storage system has been developed that uses a database technique. This medical information storage system is constructed by connecting terminals at various locations, such as a reception office, consulting rooms, X-ray inspection rooms, etc., to a database by use of data lines. The system aims to implement a series of jobs ranging from creation of information to acquisition and storage of it with easy operations.
In most cases medical information about a patient is utilized within one and the same hospital. However, in the case where past examination results for a new patient have been stored in another hospital, any hospital may need them.
In such a case, at present, a request is made to that hospital for a copy of the past examination results. However, it takes too long from when a request is made until a copy of the past examination results is obtained. In case of emergency, therefore, it is impossible to check the past examination results. Further, in most cases it is a patient himself or herself that fetches a copy of past examination results from a hospital where he or she had a medical examination previously. This may present a problem concerning security protection of medical information.
It is therefore desired to build a wide area system which links medical information storage systems of hospitals by telephone lines so as to enable medical information to be interchanged among hospitals. However, many difficulties are encountered in building such a wide area system because each hospital has installed a medical information storage system individually and thus the data structure and the information retrieval procedure may differ among hospitals.